For more than a year, Trump has said NATO is outdated and costing the United States too much money, suggesting replacing it with an alternative organisation focused on counter-terrorism and repeatedly using the word "obsolete".
What we see as flip-floppery and weakness, Trump sees as flexibility and uncertainty - which he thinks are two hallmarks of any strong deal-maker.
As a presidential candidate, Trump promised to officially call China a currency manipulator on his first day in office as president. "It's no longer obsolete", Trump said as he stood at a news conference alongside NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in the White House East Room on Wednesday.
The evolving Trump foreign policy appears to reflect less of the influence of his campaign team and more the views of Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser HR McMaster, all of whom are deeply sceptical of Russian Federation.
And, further, many nations are unlikely to reach that level of spending despite Trump's complaints. He said at his joint press conference on Wednesday, "I said it was obsolete; it's no longer obsolete". Is this a new Trump?
President Donald Trump said Wednesday it was "time to end this brutal civil war" in Syria and return refugees to their homeland.
United Airlines boss Oscar Munoz will not resign
No eyewitnesses on the plane have suggested that Mr Dao did anything but refuse to leave the plane when he was ordered to do so. A spokesperson for the airline did not say whether passengers would be compensated with credits for a future flight.
Trump also appears to have grown fond of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which has been a rallying cry for conservatives who consider it a mechanism of crony capitalism. North Atlantic Treaty Organisation did add a new assistant secretary general position focused on intelligence and security in July 2016, although experts say the change does not mark a major shift for the organization and point out that North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has long addressed concerns of terrorism.
Noting that in a more unsafe and more unpredictable world, it is important to have friends and allies, Stoltenberg said in NATO, America has the best friends and the best allies in the world.
Critics have pointed out that the Trump administration made similar distancing statements with former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and former National Security adviser Michael Flynn. "All the problems the previous administration had still remain", she said.
Mr Trump repeatedly questioned the military alliance's goal during the campaign. After all, the President has spent most of his first 100 days in office torching conventional political practice, trading in untruths and exaggerations, and pouring oil on political controversies on Twitter - including accusations that his campaign had links to the Kremlin at a time when Moscow was being accused of interfering in the USA election. Of course, this habit causes him to change his mind frequently, as we can see every day. "I'm my own strategist and it wasn't like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary".
The secretary general refused to take the bait, explaining that he "welcome [s] his very strong message on defense spending, on burden sharing, and also on NATO's role in fighting terrorism". The military alliance "also strongly supports the efforts of the fact-finding commission to find out actually what happened".
Economist Dean Baker of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research says the timing of Trump's change of views was likely related to an annual report on trade manipulators that is due from the Treasury this weekend.
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